Linger

And then my parents were holding my thin arms. I was being presented to a bathtub, though it wasn’t evening and I hadn’t been undressed. My parents were asking me to get in, and I wouldn’t, and I think they were glad, because my refusal made it easier for them than trusting compliance. My father lifted me into the water.

“Sam,” Cole said.

I was sitting in the bathtub in my clothing, the water turning my dark jeans black, feeling the water wick up through my favorite blue T-shirt with the white stripe, feeling the fabric stick to my ribs, and I thought, for a minute, for one, merciful moment, that it was a game.

“Sam,” Cole repeated.

I didn’t understand, and then, I did.

It wasn’t when my mother wouldn’t look at me, just gazing at the edge of the bathtub and swallowing, over and over. Or when my father reached behind him and said my mother’s name to get her to look at him. Or even when she took one of the razor blades from his proffered hand, her fingers careful, as if she were selecting a fragile cracker from a plate of delicacies.

It was when she finally looked at me.

At my eyes. My wolf’s eyes.

I saw the decision in her face. The letting go.

And that was when they had to hold me down.

• COLE •

Sam was somewhere else. That was the only way to put it. His eyes were just—empty. I hauled him out to the living room and shook him. “Snap out of it. We’re out! Look around, Sam. We’re out.”

When I let go of his arms, Sam slumped to the floor, back against the wall, putting his head in his hands. He was suddenly all elbows and knees and joints folded up against one another, making him faceless.

I didn’t know how I felt, seeing him there. Knowing I’d done it, whatever it was. It was making me hate him. “Sam?” I said.

After a long moment, he said, not lifting his head, his voice strange and low and thin, “Just leave me alone. Leave me alone. What did I ever do to you?” His breaths were uneven; I heard them catching in his chest. Not like sobs. More like suffocation.

I looked down at him, and suddenly anger bubbled up through me. It shouldn’t have affected him this badly. It was just a damned bathroom. It was he who was making me this cruel—I hadn’t done anything to him except shown him a damned tub. I wasn’t that person he thought I was.

“Beck chose this, too,” I told him, because he wouldn’t say anything now to contradict me. “That’s what he told me. He said that he got everything he wanted in life after law school, and he was miserable. He told me he was going to kill himself, but a guy named Paul convinced him there was another way out.”

Sam was silent except for his ragged inhalations.

“That’s the same thing he offered me,” I said. “Only I can’t stay a wolf. Don’t tell me that you don’t want to hear it. You’re just as bad as I am. Look at you. Don’t talk to me about damage.”

He didn’t move, so I did. I went to the back door and threw it open. The night had become savage and cold while I was drinking, and I was rewarded with a wrenching twist in my gut.

I escaped.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

• SAM •

I went through the actions of punching down the dough and shaping the loaf and getting the bread in the oven. My head was humming with words that were too clipped and unrelated for me to form into lyrics. I was halfway here, halfway somewhere else, standing in Beck’s same old kitchen on a night that could’ve been now or ten years ago.

The faces on the cabinet photos smiled back at me, dozens of different permutations of me and Beck, Beck and Ulrik, Paul and Derek, Ulrik and me. Faces waiting to be reinhabited. The photos looked faded and old in the dull nighttime of the kitchen. I remembered Beck taping them up, when they were brand-new, concrete proof of our ties.

I thought about how my parents so easily decided not to love me, just because I couldn’t hold on to my skin. And about how I’d been so quick to shun Beck when I’d thought that he’d infected the three new wolves against their will. It was like I could feel my parents’ imperfect love running through my veins. So quick to judge.

When I finally noticed that Cole was gone, I opened the back door and retrieved his clothing from the yard. I stood there, holding the cold bundle in my hands, and let the night air cut down inside me, past the layers of everything that made me Sam and human, to the creeping wolf that I imagined still lurking inside me. I played back Cole’s dialogue in my head.

Was he really asking for my help?

I jumped when the phone rang. The phone was missing from the base in the kitchen, so I went into the living room and sat on the arm of the sofa while I picked up the receiver in there. Grace, I hoped fiercely. Grace.

“Hi?” It occurred to me, too late, that if Grace was calling this late, there was something wrong.

But it wasn’t Grace’s voice that answered, though it was female. “Who is this?”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Someone called my cell from this number. Twice.”

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Angie Baranova.”

“When did they call?”

“Yesterday. Earlyish. No message.”

Cole. Had to be. Sloppy bastard. “Must’ve been a wrong number,” I said.

“Must’ve been,” she echoed. “Because only, like, four people have this number.”

I amended my opinion of Cole. Stupid bastard.

“Like I said,” I insisted, “a wrong number.”

“Or Cole,” Angie said.

“Excuse me?”

She gave an unfunny, ugly little laugh. “Whoever you are, I know you wouldn’t say anything even if he was standing right beside you. Because Cole’s really good at that, isn’t he? Getting you to do what he wants? Well, if he is there and it was him calling my number, tell him I’ve got a new cell. It’s one 917-get-out-of-my-life. Thanks.”

And she hung up.

I clicked TALK again to hang up the phone and leaned to return it to the cradle. I looked at Beck’s stack of books on the end table. Beside them was a picture frame with a photo Ulrik had taken of Beck right after Paul had sprayed mustard on him while we barbecued burgers. Beck squinted at me, smears of unreal yellow caught in his eyebrows and globbed in his eyelashes.

“Sounds like you picked a real winner,” I told Beck’s photo.

• GRACE •

That night, I lay in my bed, trying to forget the way the wolves had looked at me and trying to pretend that Sam was with me. Blinking in the blackness, I tugged Sam’s pillow closer to me, but I’d used up all of his scent, and it was just a pillow again. I pushed it back to his side of the bed and lifted my hand to my nostrils instead, trying to tell if I still smelled like the wolves in the woods. I pictured Isabel’s face when she said, You know this has to do with the wolves, and tried to interpret what her expression had meant. Disgust? Like I was contagious? Or was it pity?

If Sam were here, I would’ve whispered, Do you think dying people know they’re dying?

I made a face at myself in the darkness. I knew I was being melodramatic.

I wanted to believe I was just being melodramatic.

Laying a hand flat on my belly, I thought about the gnawing ache that lived a few inches below my fingers. Right now, the pain seemed dull, slumbering.

I pressed my fingers into my skin.

I know you’re there.

It seemed pitiful to be sitting awake in bed, contemplating my mortality alone, while Sam was within easy driving distance. I shot a futile glance up toward my parents’ room, irritated that they’d deprived me of his company when I most needed it.

If I died now, I’d never go to college. I’d never live on my own. I’d never buy my own coffeepot (I wanted a red one). I’d never marry Sam. I’d never get to be Grace the way Grace was meant to be.

I had been so careful, my entire life.

I considered my own funeral. No way would Mom have enough common sense to plan it. Dad would do it between calls to investors and HOA board members. Or Grandma. She might step up to the plate once she knew what a crappy job her son was doing of raising her granddaughter. Rachel would come, and probably a few of my teachers. Definitely Mrs. Erskine, who wanted me to be an architect. Isabel, too, though she probably wouldn’t cry. I remembered Isabel’s brother’s funeral—the whole town had turned out, because of his age. So maybe I would get a good crowd, even if I hadn’t been a legend in Mercy Falls, just by virtue of having died too young to have actually lived. Did people bring gifts to funerals like they did to weddings and baby showers?

I heard a creak outside my door. A sudden pop, a foot on a floorboard, and then the door creeping softly open.

For a single, tiny moment, I thought it might be Sam, somehow, miraculously sneaking in. But then from my nest in my blankets, I saw the shape of my father’s shoulders and head as he leaned into my room. I did my best to look asleep while still keeping my eyes slitted open. My father came in a few, hesitant steps, and I thought, with surprise, He’s checking to see if I’m all right.

But then he lifted his chin just a little bit, to look at a place just beyond me, and I realized that he wasn’t here to make sure I was all right. He was just here to make sure Sam wasn’t with me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

• COLE •

Crouched on the cold forest floor, pine needles pressing into my palms, blood smeared over my bare knees, I couldn’t remember how long I’d been human.

I was suspended in a pale blue morning, fog tinting everything pastel as it moved slowly around me. The air reeked of blood, feces, and brackish water. It only took a glance at my hands to see where the smells came from. The lake was a few yards away from me, and between me and the water lay a dead deer, flat on her side. A flap of skin folded back from her ribs, presenting her innards like a gruesome gift. It was her blood that was smeared across my knees and, I saw now, my hands as well. In the overhead branches, invisible in the mist, crows called back and forth to one another, eager for me to lose interest in my kill.

I cast a glance around me, looking for the other wolves that must’ve helped me to take down the doe, but they had left me alone. Or, more truthfully, I’d left them, by shifting into a reluctant human.

Slight movement caught my eye; I darted a glance toward it. It took me a moment to realize what had moved—the doe. Her eye. She blinked, and as she did, I saw that she was looking right at me. Not dead—dying. Funny how two things could be so similar and yet so far apart. Something about the expression in her liquid black eye made my chest hurt. It was like—patience. Or forgiveness. She had resigned herself to the fate of being eaten alive.

“Jesus,” I whispered, getting slowly to my feet, trying not to alarm her further. She didn’t even flinch. Just this: blink. I wanted to back away, give her space, let her escape, but the exposed bones and spilled guts told me flight was impossible for her. I’d already ruined her body.

I felt a bitter smile twist my lips. Here it was, my brilliant plan to stop being Cole and slip into oblivion. Here it was. Standing naked and painted with death, my empty stomach twisting with hunger while I faced a meal for something I wasn’t anymore.